Winners and Losers

Filed in archive Opinions & Insights on June 23, 2008

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 5369501

One of my favorite regular bloggers, Ann All, wrote this interesting post about winners and losers in the global outsourcing marketplace. Most significant to me was the portion of the article pointing out that the low high-school graduation rates in US schools is making it difficult to on-shore customer service work, even when a company wants to.

What makes this particularly interesting is the lack of recognition that the staffing model for off-shore customer service providers generally call for college graduates - people with an education that far exceeds the requirements of the position. Many times, when given half a chance, these college graduates jump to higher level work - leading to high attrition and service instability. In cities with developing infrastructure for outsourcing, this may prove to be a difficult phenomenon to address.

That being said, there are always other third-world cities to move to and, now that these processes have become mobile, they will likely continue migrating to lower cost labor markets. It is only a matter of time before systems actively enable lowest-cost call routing on a real time basis. At that point, the lessons learned in North America and Europe - that job security is a fleeting phenomenon - will likely be repeated in other cities as their economies grow, but fall short of self-sufficiency.